Video 5:54
Tribute to a mountaineering legend

Matt StanleyUpdated
Mon 14 Jan 2008, 9:50 AM AEDT

Queen Elizabeth has paid tribute New Zealand adventurer Sir Edmund Hillary, who died in Auckland yesterday at 88 years of age.

Transcript

HEATHER EWART: Welcome to the program. I'm Heather Ewart. Also tonight, the controversy over the casino and its pokie den for smokers. But first, to millions around the world Sir Edmund Hillary was the epitome of a dashing adventurer, the man who conquered the highest mountain in the world. But the man himself was humble about his achievements, preferring instead to focus on helping his beloved Sherpas. In a life that was marked by personal tragedy as welll as triumph, he came to represent the ideals of bravery and decency. Above all, he was a colossus in his native New Zealand, where he died today at the age of 88.

Matthew Stanley reports.

MATTHEW STANLEY: It was one of the defining achievements of the 20th century.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: We stood on the summit of the world. It was certainly a moment of enormous satisfaction.

BBC NEWS COMMENTATOR: This is the BBC home service, here is the news. Mount Everest has been conquered by members of the British expedition.

MATTHEW STANLEY: Those words sound quaint now but Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of the world's highest mountain along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was an echo of the great days of empire, especially as it happened on the eve of the Queen's coronation. Sir Edmund Hillary was not British, describing himself as an ordinary Kiwi bloke and summing up his crowning achievement in that fashion.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: When I came down and George said, "How did it go, Ed?" And George was an old climbing companion and I wasn't thinking of the world at all and I said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."

ALFRED GREGORY, 1953 EVEREST EXPEDITION: Everybody was jumping and hugging them and so on and tears running down their cheeks.

MATTHEW STANLEY: Alfred Gregory was part of the famous expedition and his photographic record of it has only recently been published in a book.

ALFRED GREGORY: He was a mate of mine. He was a friend of mine, a fairly rough diamond in a sort of way.

MATTHEW STANLEY: Sir Edmund's origins were humble enough. He came from a tiny town of Tuakau, south of Auckland, and worked as a beekeeper after dropping out of university. But in conquering Mount Everest, his place in history was assured.

REX PEMBERTON, MOUNTAINEER: He loved climbing. That ran through his veins, that passion for climbing, and he can be remembered as a hero.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: I mean, there's nothing very heroic about Tenzing and myself. We were energetic and tough and appeared to take a certain number of risks and we wanted to get to the top but it was really the media that created Tenzing and myself as fantastic characters, overcoming insuperable odds to reach the summit, and I have tried now for more than 40 years to destroy this illusion, but it's impossible so now I just accept it.

MATTHEW STANLEY: Rex Pemberton, the youngest Australian to clime Mount Everest, is one of the legion of climbers inspired by Edmund Hillary.

REX PEMBERTON: All climbers in general look up to Hillary as a hero and what they did on that ascent, I mean, they had 350 people helping them out to get there but Tenzing and Hillary did it in the end and they did it with technology that's minimal compared to what we've got today.

NEWS REPORTER: Two unassuming men have climbed the 29,000 foot monarch of the Himalayas.

MATTHEW STANLEY: Having reached the pinnacle of mountain climbing, Sir Edmund searched for and found new fields to conquer. In 1958, joining the first overland trek to the South Pole since Scott, using farm tractors.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: I can remember stepping out of the helicopter on this spot here and looking around and thinking to myself, "This is it, we can head towards the Pole, we can do anything."

MATTHEW STANLEY: But the continuing theme of his life was a love of Nepal and its people.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: The Sherpas and I live on a pretty tough and rigorous sort of environment, but they have a tremendously good sense of humour. If one of their Sherpa friends breaks his leg they all laugh about it for weeks but it's that sort of rugged sense of humour but one that rather I think appeals probably to Australians and New Zealanders and I certainly built up a very happy relationship with the Sherpas.

NORBU TENZING, SON OF NORGAY TENZING: Today is a very sad day for Sherpas all around the world. He was a father figure to us and he's a person we will dearly miss.

ALFRED GREGORY: His greatest work really was not climbing Mount Everest really, but was the setting up of the schools and hospitals in Sherpa country, for the Sherpa community in all those years after Mount Everest.

MATTHEW STANLEY: It was an affection that didn't wane even after his first wife Louise and their 16-year-old daughter Belinda were killed in a plane crash at Kathmandu in 1975.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: I was looking forward very much to my wife and Belinda joining me and as time went by I could only think there had been bad weather in Kathmandu or something disastrous had occurred.

MATTHEW STANLEY: The shock of this loss left him battling depression for several years, eventually working his way out of it to become New Zealand's High Commissioner to India. He married June Mulgrew, the widow of his friend Peter Mulgrew, a fellow mountaineer who died in the Air New Zealand on Mount Erebus in Antarctica. All the while he continued to return to Nepal.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: Yes, it's a couple of years since I've been up there, so it's a very exciting moment for me.

MATTHEW STANLEY: He was there again as recently as April last year. He fell during that visit and was hospitalised when he got back to New Zealand. His health had been in decline ever since. After 88 years of adventure, achievement and service to others, the world's most famous mountaineer will be missed most in the country of his birth.

VOX POP: It's a great loss to the country. We'll really miss him.

MATTHEW STANLEY: Typically, the man himself summed up his life more modestly.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY: I really had a marvellous life, many good adventures. I've had two wonderful wives (Laughs). You can't do better than that.